Battlefield V’s latest trailer shows off Firestorm mode

A new trailer for Battlefield V has revealed more details about what players can expect when the game is released. The six and a half minute video released by EA offers clips showing new environments, new game modes, and new game mechanics – with an informative voiceover included.

Battle Royale style games are a hot topic at the moment so it is interesting to learn more about the Firestorm multi-player mode. In Firestorm “we’ve reimagined Battle Royale for the Battlefield” with 16 teams of 4 fight it out to become the last squad standing in the largest, says EA. The voiceover adds that the Firestorm arena is a “sandbox filled with destructible buildings, weaponry and vehicles”.

New regions/situations unexplored by the franchise previously in WWII include; tank battles in North Africa, airdrops into Norway, Rotterdam canals and bridges, and the fields and marshlands of the French countryside. When it launches the game will have four single-player War Stories to play through, and a fifth subbed ‘The Last Tiger’ will be released as an update later on.

Core gameplay changes for Battlefield V have been introduced too. The developers promise deeper squad play, better gun mechanics and slicker more natural player movements. Things you might notice immediately are that you can ‘sprint’ while crouching – helping you move between cover, you will be able to smash and jump through windows, and walk backwards while firing too. Thanks to the increased levels of destructibility, mentioned above, players can construct roadblocks, fortify structures, and even dig foxholes (depending upon location).

Toned down raytracing

As Battlefield V edges nearer to release we hear that the lavish raytracing seen at the Nvidia RTX 20 series launch will be toned down for the finished version of the game. There were comments, and memes, suggesting the 'RTX On' mode was a little over-egged in the Nvidia on-stage demos, so this move should be welcome.

Tom’s Hardware talked to EA DICE devs about the upcoming release and highlighted one key nugget from the discussions “the company had to dial back the ray tracing technology in order to increase frame rates and make the images look more credible.” It is further explained that as the materials in the game haven’t been tweaked for raytracing sometimes they show off reflections that are too strong or simply act in an unintended fashion.

In their DXR (DirectX Ray Tracing) implementation the developers aim to utilise many cores for processing so they expect that six-core and above processors will prove advantageous. It was indicated that EA DICE has tuned its DXR performance for Nvidia GPUs only, thus far. However, it was said that general DX12 performance in Battlefield V will be similar to that in Battlefield 1. Lastly, Tom’s Hardware were surprised that “DICE eschewed multi-GPU support,” especially since the RTX On mode users can only hope for 60fps at 1080p with the top-end GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

Battlefield V will be released on 20th November on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. There is no Premium Pass, any post-launch content will be free for all players.

So disappointing that their “Battle Royale” mode is nothing of the sort - 64 players, squad only (as far as we know)..really unimpressed with that. Fingers crossed they release a single player varient as keeping it to squads only is a really, really bad move.

I put a couple of hours in to the open beta last night and I had a lot of fun. At first glance, BFV looks like BF1 but with new skins..however the gameplay is very different and at least so far the battles have proven to be much more interesting. It's generally a lot slower paced than BF1 which is great - so there is less of the whole spawn/die pattern that you may be used to.

Class loadouts have completed changed too - this is something that initially i hated but I am coming round to the idea. The biggest change is that the medic class now doesn't get to use SLRs/DMRs - its sub machine guns only at least at the start. That means no more mid-range medic play where you can defend behind the lines and pop out for revives….this sounds a problem at first, but the result is that the assault class is now viable as a main class (it really wasn't in BF1..there was no point, you may as well just play medic). time will tell if it also means there are less medics on the field though!

It's a lot of fun but there is definitely a lot of tweaking still to be done. The change i hate the most (and also love..) is the reduced ammo count. You now only spawn with a full mag in your weapon, and a single spare magazine. You get more ammo from support classes, ammo dumps, or you can pick up approx 1/2 a mag from a dead body (if you dont get killed whilst retrieving it). At the moment this feels like they have gone a step too far - I agree with reducing ammo counts it makes a lot of sense, but I think we are 1 clip shot of the sweet spot at the moment. This game will get tiresome very quickly if they don't change that! there were SO many pistol kills last night as people kept running out of their main ammo and had to switch to secondary..its a bit silly.

Hopefully they month delay they have put in will resolve this…but so far it seems a decent enough game, and much more than a reskin of BF1

edit: oh its worth noting that currently in the beta, the DX12 performance on a GTX1080 @ ultra/1440p is still dire. Buttery smooth on DX11 though!